Code:ART Festival

Installation Site: 581 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA. 

Image credit: Benny Villarreal.

Intersection was an immersive light- and sound-based multimedia art installation where an underwater forest moved into a downtown alley. The visitor was invited into a multisensory dream world where hidden messages from the sea were uncovered. Intersection provided a place to pause, reflect, and feel, inviting the visitor on a journey of discovery between the artificial and natural, self and community, past and future.

Ruokan He is a Palo Alto based creator, designer and musician. She weaves music, future technology and mixed-reality into immersive experiences that blurs the boundaries of reality and imagination, organic and digital, harmony and dissonance. Ruokan He draws inspiration from the ocean and the environment, in creating experience about connections. She was an AI artist at the 2022 Stochastic lab, has received a Telly Award, showcased her games at the Indiecade Festival, collaborated with dancers in interactive shows, and performed at various venues since 2015.

Collaborators on Intersection: Rehmi Post, Selene Mota, Karl Gumerlock, and James Young.

Installation site: 536 Emerson St, Palo Alto, CA.

Image credit: Benny Villarreal.

Helix Seats was an innovative art installation featuring two inflatable helices designed for interactive engagement. As LEDs came to life within the helices, Helix Seats illuminated the space with a mesmerizing dance of colors between the forms, evoking a sense of wonder and unity. Beyond their function as seating, the Helix Seats doubled as eye-catching sculptural centerpieces and giant sensory play objects. The installation's dynamic nature allowed it to enliven and unify, while the LED lighting within the helices added a touch of visual appeal, creating an engaging and inspiring atmosphere for all visitors.

Pneuhaus is an art and design studio that specializes in exuberant transformations of public space. Their immersive sculptures and environments guide visitors into the universe of their senses and the joys of shared experience. Inspired by physics, biology, and craft, Pneuhaus studio’s work incorporates the lessons of nature in both form and function.

Installation site: Lytton Plaza, 200 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA.

Image credit: Benny Villarreal.

Ripple invited the public to experience sound in a new interactive and playful way offering an audiovisual performance. Inspired by the natural world and activated through motion, the multisensory installation investigated how ripples affect each other to create dynamic patterns similarly to how societal systems we put in place create complexity. Ripple explored the visible effects of sound and vibration, replicating a form of sound therapy known as Vibroacoustic Therapy (VAT), which is known to alleviate stress.

Jeffrey Yip is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist producing installations and performances that emphasize technology as a tool of creation. Interested in uniting the senses as an approach to building experiences, he combines light and sound in physical and virtual spaces. His work explores technology imagined as a means to facilitate healing as a form of radical justice, and often works collaboratively to create sustainable communities. In 2015, Jeffrey co-founded Macro Waves, a studio of designers and artists of color who specialize in producing immersive experience through conceptual art, new media, and design.

Installation site: 555 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA.

Image credit: Benny Villarreal.

River of Shadows included a dynamic interactive digital mural, projected on a mapped surface of a removable screen. As visitors approached, they saw their shadows in the colored light. These shadows were mirrored above, at the head of the "river" joining the silhouettes of other colors of previous visitors. Their saved shadows created the visual river, and the current visitor's color and shadow was added to the river as well.

River of Shadows takes its name from Rebecca Solnit's account and critical interpretation of Eadweard Muybridge's work "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West," in particular the well-known investigations into motion done at Leland Stanford's nearby ranch. The installation revisited the concepts she articulates of fluid time, stopped time, instantaneous time, and reconstructed time, and attempted to muddy any boundary between art and technology, as Muybridge did. The visual language of the installation incorporated artifacts from the computer-vision algorithms that drive it and much of the world today.

Cory Barr’s multidisciplinary work challenges the objectivity of human perception, our interpersonal interactions, and the nature of creativity. His pieces extend the traditions of Light and Space art, Participatory art, and Conceptual process art. Contemporary and emerging technologies are used to push our technological inheritance into areas not strictly driven by commercial or government goals. Mediums include programmable lights, cameras, prints, and custom computer software.

Paul Mans is an interactive artist and engineer whose light based work explores intent and perception through the lens of movement. He uses cameras, projectors, and custom computer software to mix reality, and invites participants to be collaborators.

Installation site: 339 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA.

Image credit: Benny Villarreal.

Bureau of Cloud Management (BCM) is an imaginary government bureau that monitors clouds entering its jurisdiction. This interactive simulated environment project was created as part of the artist duo's art research on the emerging co-creating patterns between human and AI generating models, focusing on how human agency is affected during co-creating. It’s an artistic intervention that invites machine agency and human agency to collaboratively recreate the experience of observing clouds - one of the most imaginative human activities, which draws the initial picture of the dreams of every one of us and associates ourselves with our primitive thinking of and connection with the broader world. The duo imagined the BCM, a speculative government agency that manages the clouds passing by its jurisdictive sky area. The artists invited the public to role-play the staff cloud observers, using voice input to share their observations of clouds through visiting a web portal on their mobile devices. An ML-based synthesis pipeline transform these audio observations into simulated 3D clouds and showcased the public’s collective imagination as an immersive media installation.

Tong Wu is a creative technologist and multimedia artist raised on the Internet. She now co-exists with her digital doubles in New York and the Chrome browser. Wu's art research focuses on cyberculture, the digital system, and how "individuals" form relationships with their over-populated avatars in the era of digital. She uses various media, such as 3D visuals, machine-learning models, and web-based experience to construct a speculative world of digital doubles and present the fluid yet dystopian nature of the "individual".

Wu graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the photojournalism program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has exhibited her work internationally, including INDEX Biennale 2022 in Braga, Portugal, Koganechō Art Management Center in Yokohama, Japan, CURRENTS New Media Festival in New Mexico, U.S., International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) DocLab Session in Amsterdam, Netherlands, CultureHub & La Mama experimental theater club in New York, U.S., SandBox Immersive Festival Acceleration Program in Hangzhou, China.

Yuguang (YG) Zhang is a New York-based new media / AI artist, a lead machine learning technologist at De-Yan, and a member of NUUM Collective. His current practice, which incorporates interactive media, installation, and live performance, focuses on the reciprocal relationship between human and technology, the connections people make with tangible and intangible AI, and the cultural, societal & ethical shifts that come along.

Zhang's works have been showcased at NeurIPS, aiartonline, ML x Art, Neural, the NYC Media Lab Summit, New Inc., CultureHub, La MaMa, Movement Research, Battery Dance Festival, The Center at West Park, Currents New Media Festival, and Processing Foundation community conference in New York, NY, Brown Arts Initiative in Providence, RI, Cycling ‘74 Expo in North Adams, MA, Maxxi - The National Museum of XXI Century Arts at Rome, Fu:bar art festival at Zagreb, Beijing Times Arts Museum, B·O·N·D International Virtual Live Performance Festival in Shanghai and more.

Installation site: 285 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA.

Image credit: Benny Villarreal.